Boudin

Unsteady Hands

Friday, May 5, 2017

Hervé Guibert, detail of photograph.

The prose fragment is a form capable of kindness. After I thought of that sentence, I thought of reading Hervé Guibert again, with students, this quarter. In his use, the fragment has so much discretion all along its edges. We all exist beyond those edges. It’s like sending a note when a call might be intrusive, or stepping aside the right degree, to make way but not to shun.

It’s not that his writing is especially interested in kindness, but, in writing and photography, he is interested in recognition, both the kind you can accomplish steadily, and the kind where you flinch away. This is a Guibert self-portrait, from 1981.

Yesterday I was thinking about Degas. And wondering about his hands when, late in life, he could barely see. I remember reading in a wall text at the Metropolitan Museum that one of his friends helped him to feel a painting he was curious about. What I wondered yesterday was how the paint felt to his fingers, if his hands felt steady to him. I think of steadiness of hand and steadiness of gaze going together. The fact that my hands feel unsteady to me lately seems related to how much I flinch away, from what I am reading, even from watching peoples’ faces. In every news article, in the faces of people crossing the street, I seem to see great vulnerability, that we are menaced.

Here is an essay by Guibert I didn’t know about. It is a photograph, the joint effort of the subject and the photographer to understand, among other things, Degas. Some day, I hope I will write about the way the picture reflects on Degas’ ideas about the brave efforts of our bodies, about drawing and sculpture and form. But my hands are a little unsteady today.

Giacometti at the New Fogg

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Giacometti, Portrait of David Sylvester, 1960, detail, Fogg Museum

Giacometti made this portrait of the British art critic David Sylvester in 1960:

I think a restful thing about Giacometti is the way different permutations of the same lines and shadings -- the same darkly scratched lines and the same shadings of gray, white, and black -- constitute both the figure and the ground.

Ornament and Negative Space

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Degas, Edmondo and Therese Morbilli, about 1865, MFA, iphone detail

The trio of Degas portraits currently at the MFA (written about here two weeks ago) has drawn my attention back to Degas. In half an hour with the Degas at the Metropolitan Museum, and on a quick return visit to those at the MFA, I found myself concentrating on the negative spaces, what happens beyond the edges of the figures, and on the things between things. I looked closely at Edmondo and Therese Mobilli, the portrait Degas made of his sister and her husband about 1865, and at Duchessa di Montejasi, with her daughters Elena and Camilla, from about 1876.

And then at home, I went back to some passages of Degas’ notebooks, and was struck by one I had marked before:

"Draw a lot. Oh, beautiful drawing! – Ornament is the intelligence connecting one thing and another or [one] overcomes this gap by a connection between the two things andthat’s the source of ornament…." {from Sources & Documents: Impression and Post-Impression, 1874-1904, compiled Linda Nochlin, notebook of 1869, quoted on p62.}

It’s this sentence: “Ornament is the intelligence connecting one thing and another,” or the effort of overcoming the gap between two things is the “source of ornament.” Here is an evidently ornamented passage in the portrait Degas made of his sister and her husband:

The idea of connectivity seems naturally connected to hands – with what else do we stretch across to “another thing.”

A further sense of how these connections might be discovered to the viewer comes from a later notebook passage with more instructions the painter made to himself:

"Do every kind of worn object placed, accompanied in such a way that they have the life of the man or the woman; corsets which have just been taken off, for example – and which keep the form of the body, etc. etc." {see source above, p63.}

Of course one thinks immediately of Degas’ bathers, his dancers. But even when his people are still wearing their clothes, the clothes follow their forms in such a way that one can almost see a kind of trailing off of the form as one comes to the spaces between the figures.

I think part of the beauty of this so-beautiful space between the Duchessa and her daughter is that it still somehow has the residue of their two forms. The painter has found a way to overcome an obviously formidable distance between them.

Close Observation

Monday, January 20, 2014

A woman, long blue shirt carefully tied over striped skirt, sits in a red chair. She leans a little to her right, our left, elbow on the arm of chair. Her hands are folded.

Cézanne’s way of painting faces means that you can look at them or not. Everything has surfaces and depths. Much of the meaning of the figure is not in the face. The folded hands are important and beautiful.

Between the forefingers and thumbs are a green that relates them to the skirt below, a blue consonant with the blue shirt above. Shapes of laced fingers echo shape of dark what seems to be locket or pendant about neck.

Somewhere Roger Fry writes about the courage of Cézanne’s face-on verticality. The painting ought to be static, there is so little motion in the way the figure and face are arranged. All the motion has to come from the paint itself.

The red armchair. Faces, designs, flowers in it. Begins to have an unusual kind of softness around her.

The model is Hortense Fiquet, for many years his mistress and eventually his wife. He painted her almost thirty times.

The skirt.

Another place of conjunction. Red tassel over yellow wall with blue wainscoting, edge of blue shirt over skirt. All this is beautiful, orderly, loved, observed, and yet paint.